Ruby Protocol Monthly Review — March 2023
As always, welcome back to Ruby Protocol.
As it turns out, amid the chaos of March comes many opportunities for the crypto communities. What happened in March was so significant that we feel obligated to discuss its implications here.
The winner of the month’s most unforgettable event is the Depegging of Circle-issued USD Coin, which naturally shook the crypto market and communities. However, to completely understand how the de-pegging happens, we must go back to the opening chapter of this story — the force of the Fed.
How Did it Happen?
The Federal Reserve ushered the US and the rest of the world into a decade of “zero money” interest rates in response to the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. And if interest rates ever hit zero, money would be free, meaning the economy should be like an open bar — a real party. As a result, billions poured into banks, looking for storage and returns.
However, the music would eventually stop, and the party would end.
To control inflation and stabilize the economy, interest rates started sharply rising last year, and depositors demanded higher returns. As a result, the bank was forced to sell some of those bonds at a loss. When news of that hit social media, tech investors panicked, triggering a classic bank run. From there, it took 36 hours for the second-biggest bank failure in US history to materialize.
Now enters the protagonist — U.S.-based stablecoin issuer Circle. When its fund ($3.3 billion of its reserves) was found to be tied up in embattled Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and the banking industry seemed to be nearing a meltdown, its price against the dollar plunged to 87 cents.
Reading Between the Lines
The debate of whether the authority should bear the power to manipulate, for lack of a better word, the market will never end. And we have no intention of ending that debate here. However, this SVB collapse and many others in the future should prompt us to create an alternative system free from political affiliations and persuasions.
Because people should realize how powerful the ‘money printer’ or the complete opposite is. If all the money in the system was created out of nothing and injected into or extracted out of the economy through a few specific channels. In that case, everything in modern society is influenced, even culture and morality. It distorts the market pricing mechanism and distorts all economic activities.
Suggesting crypto and decentralization as a once-for-all solution to such a fiasco would be naive. Still, it would also be a gigantic waste of opportunity if we look the other way in experimenting for a viable alternative. After all, it already took us over a decade to build the infrastructure.
Price is the True Measure
If you don’t believe in the concept of market efficiency, please skip this section. However, if you do, you can see what people are voting for in this tumultuous time.
At the time of writing this, Bitcoin, the world’s largest digital asset by market capitalization, recently pushed past $28,000, gaining 3% in the last 24 hours.
People who bet on the demise of crypto are now pouring their money into it because it turns out that after Silvergate and Signature die, there’s a systematic crisis of confidence in the global financial system, which has rekindled an appetite for risk assets as TradFi liquidity dries up.
Ruby V2 & A New Chapter
Nobody can triumph standing still.
The diversity of today’s data needs and the density of the technical landscape necessitate systematic thinking when it comes to solving such issues, which is why we are now upgrading Ruby Protocol to a programmable privacy & access control middleware framework encrypted with zero-knowledge proofs (zkp) algorithms.
With the new positioning, we update Ruby Protocol’s official website and are now bringing zero-knowledge proofs (zkp) algorithms into full play to allow our users to interact with added-value digital services while protecting the privacy of their data. In addition, zkp incorporation will provide flexibility and choice to whoever wants control and freedom over their information.
And driven by abstract accounts, Ruby Protocol is building an access control gateway across different entities and organizations in DeFi and Web3. The solutions and products include all kinds of private tokenization (zkToken, zkNFT, zkDID, etc.), private payment bridge (zkConnect), authentication (zkAuth), and account/sub-account system (zkWallet), etc.
If you’re hardcore about protecting your privacy & ownership, building a better Web3, and bringing crypto user experience to a different level.
Ruby V2 is here to help you.
Talk to us and let’s build it 👉 Let’s Make Privacy Possible Everywhere.
Introducing Ruby Solution Matrix
By introducing our unique product and solution matrix. The assets, products, and services listed above comprise a solid structure upon which we can build a full suite of cryptographic privacy and access control infrastructure.
- Ruby zkConnect is a secure payment method that conceals transactions based on the Zether framework.
- Ruby zkAuth is the cornerstone of Ruby Protocol and contains two fundamental features: Proof of Access and Key Management.
- Ruby zkWallet is the next phase of our roadmap, which is to perform control over sub-accounts via EOA, each of which is a contract account.
Ruby zkConnect Growth & Recap
Ruby zkConnect, as it is called under the new technical roadmap, has seen steady growth since it was launched 90 days ago.
The secure payment method has
Processed over 13,793 transactions
Created 4,200+ Ruby Accounts
Interacted with 4,000+ active addresses
Handled over 2.79 million USDT
And still counting…
Around the end of 2022, as a part of our unremitting efforts to build a privacy-centric programmable access control middleware for Web3, we introduced to the world a new Layer 2 application, Ruby Connect.
Ruby Connect was initiated in response to the growing concerns about privacy and security in online payments. It aims to address the most fundamental need of crypto space, which is to enforce value transfer with guaranteed privacy and enable cross-chain privacy-preserving access control while protecting your assets and on-chain data.
A quarter after the launch, we did a comprehensive review of Ruby Connect to keep track of the progress made so far, the challenges faced, how they were addressed, and the following steps to be taken.
This helps us to ensure that Ruby Connect is aligned with our vision.
The Dapp Status Report comprises the following sections:
- Ruby Connect Background
- Its Key Metrics & Usage State
- The results of the growth and marketing campaigns
- The lessons learned, challenges, and opportunities
- The future plan
Technical Foothold — Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Zero-Knowledge Proofs are the essential technical component of Ruby Protocol that helps build a programmable privacy & access control middleware framework. It will become a vital tool for developing secure and privacy-preserving systems in the future.
ZKPs are a type of cryptographic protocol that allow a prover to convince a verifier of the validity of a statement without revealing any information beyond what is necessary. This property makes ZKPs a powerful tool for protecting sensitive information in various contexts.
ZKPs is the technical foothold of Ruby Protocol, making us obligated to break it down and popularize it in an easy-to-digest manner. We believe once it is understood, more and more people will be able to trust it, use it, and troubleshoot its problems. Eventually, society will arrive at a point where we can customize and reshape it and take advantage of it.
If you are a fan of our efforts, please like and retweet the Zero-Knowledge Proofs 101 thread:
Banks Making a Case for us
If you are in favor of this proposition, please like and retweet our tweet thread:
The Silicon Valley Bank incident was the most significant U.S. bank failure since the 2008 crisis, stranding billions of dollars belonging to companies and investors. Moreover, it shows the dark sides of the TradFi world, making a case for crypto and decentralization.
What happened was a bit of an ironic black swan situation where the contagion was not from crypto to TradFi — the contagion was TradFi to crypto. The fractional reserve banking system allows banks to operate under insufficient funds and use customer funds in loans to other customers. Under particular circumstances, banks can either go into insolvency or default on their notes. Such a situation is called a bank run and causes the demise we saw.
USDC lost its dollar value because its issuer chose to store its reserve with a bank. Such dependence almost killed it.
And what happened drove decentralized finance (DeFi) transactions, and with it, the number of unique active wallets interacting with DeFi contracts surged from 421,026 on March 8th to 477,094 on March 11th, a 13% increase. Transaction count increased by 23%.
The SVB collapse highlights how Bitcoin, crypto, and DeFi are essential to the economy; they offer us an alternative to the banking system where you don’t have to rely on someone else doing things that you’re not necessarily even aware of.
About Us
Ruby Protocol is a programmable privacy & access control middleware framework encrypted with zero-knowledge proofs (zkp) algorithms.
Driven by abstract accounts, it builds an access control gateway across different entities and organizations in DeFi and Web3. The solutions and products include all kinds of private tokenization (zkToken, zkNFT, zkDID, etc), private payment bridge (zkConnect), authentication (zkAuth) and account/sub- account system (zkWallet), etc.
